This is my first how-to. It came about because of my having searched around and played around for the past week to get my particular setup running. Now I am not an expert at this, and this will probably show through when I write this howto.

Anyway this how to is for those using a Ricoh PCI to PCMCIA card cradle, with a PRISM2/2.5 PC-CARD (PCMCIA) wireless network adaptor. I personally am using a Senao NL-2511CD EXT 2 PLUS card in my cradle.

I originally had problems jus simply following the HostAP readme (although you know how often instructions get followed correctly so it was most likely my fault by not reading enough). I had everything installed but when modprobing it told me possible IRQ conflict so I spent a little time trying to figure out how to get the IRQ's working properly. Anyway turns out I followed the steps below to eventually get everything up and running.

Then make the appropriate changes to your grub or lilo config so that you can boot from the new kernel
Reboot

2: emerge pcmcia-cs (Needed because we didn't use the kernel PCMCIA drivers)

3 emerge wireless-tools (To be able to configure and use your wireless adaptor )

If you want to do it the easy way then go to the configuration section as your card should be useable by now

Now if you want to use it as an AP you should emerge hostap or do the next best thing as the ebuild version seems pretty old 0.0.2 and go and get it your self currently 0.0.3 or alternatively CVS.

4 # emerge hostap
OR
4 # tar xvzf hostap-0.0.3.tar.gz
4.1 # tar xvzf /usr/portage/distfiles/pcmcia-cs* (check your own version number and make sure path below corresponds to the directory that the tar creates)
4.2 # cd hostap-0.0.3 see README incase instructions vary from mine
4.3 # nano -w Makefile
Edit the following KERNEL_PATH=/usr/src/linux & PCMCIA_PATH=/path/to/pcmcia-cs when finished save it and exit
4.4 # make pccard
4.5 Assuming all goes well then # make install_pccard
If all goes well then you are almost set.

Configuration: Now that the preliminary stuff is all ready, we just need to configure the card.

copied from HOSTAP README (too lazy to type it in my own words)
If you are using hostap_cs.o version, pcmcia-cs needs to know which
driver to use for each PC Card. This driver has its own file
(/etc/pcmcia/hostap_cs.conf) that lists few PC Cards that are
supported. It does not include every Prism2/2.5-based card, so you may
need to add your model to hostap_cs.conf in order to get the driver
started. If you add new model information to the configuration file
and the card works with this driver, please send me the output of
'cardctl ident' and the lines you added so that I can include them
in the next release.
##Please NOTE: Don't send your configuration file to me but to the guys who work on hostap.

5: Now edit your /etc/confi.d/pcmcia options so that your socket driver is PCIC="i82365" and your PCIC_OPTS="irq_mode=0" (use only PCI IRQs)
This is to make sure that our PCMCIA card in the cradle will work correctly

If you have anything to add or change just let me know. This is really the first I have done with wireless and am still learning.
But would just like to thank the guys who have helped with Gentoo It's the most fun I have had using linux since I started dabbling in linux maybe 7 years ago. But now all
my three machines are using Gentoo.